Musings and Leadings

Rachel and I were both bloggers who traveled a lot—though she did this on a much larger scale than I did. I remember bonding over an ice cream place in the Atlanta airport, a place we both ended up frequently. Now I blog a lot less, and my stomach won’t let me eat ice cream anymore. And this morning I found out that Rachel Held Evans has died.

If we want the Religious Society of Friends to be prophetic—and that’s a big if—we are going to have to get a lot more willing to sit with discomfort. What if we take our old practices and try to reimagine them? Give them new life? When someone comes with a strong leading (or even a hope) can we listen together? Or will we say, “we don’t do things that way” or “we tried that before and it didn’t work.”

We have adopted this at the Church of Mary Magdalene as our conflict resolution policy.  And it’s how I personally try to resolve conflicts.  It’s a practice that I’m committed to, like yoga.  And it’s one that I’m really bad at, also like yoga. 

I want little girls like Talia to know that Jesus chose a woman to be the first preacher.  I want women to know that their gifts are precious and valuable.  And I had a dream about preaching for women, which led to this Wednesday night worship.

I love semi-programmed worship because I think it is the most welcoming form of Quaker worship.  In semi-programmed worship, someone in the community explains each part of the worship, and everyone knows what to expect next.

In some ways, I want to encourage you to be like Joseph: Wear your princess coat!  Wear your rainbow flag!  Be who you are.  Queer it up!  But I also want to encourage you to not be like Joseph, who could not see the way his brothers were marginalized or his brothers’ pain and fear.

I tell Hannah about a dream I had the night before about preaching for women. I dreamed that when I looked out at the congregation, the chairs were mostly empty, but there were women sitting in chairs near the back. As I looked out at them, the women moved their chairs to the front to listen to me preach.

Church of Mary Magdalene is a place where women preach. It is a community where the voices of women, queer people, and others on the margins are centered. This is not just a worship where women and queer people are welcome, but rather a worship by and for women and queer people.

My New Year’s resolution for 2016 was to embrace the new, and there were a lot of new things this year!  The first few months were my last semester at Candler School of Theology.  I devoted most of that time to working on my thesis, “Dangerous Women’s Bodies: Stories of How Women Ministers are Threatening and Threatened.”

If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone . . .

It's a little intimidating to start a new blog.  When I began the blog A Passionate and Determined Quest for Adequacy back in 2008, I was in the middle of a life-changing call to ministry and I needed a place to talk about it.  In that first year, I wrote in a flurry, sharing all of the new and exciting things happening in my life and ministry.